Corrugated paper board display stands are widely used at the retail level for display of merchandise for sale to consumers. Many such displays are nothing more than cardboard boxes imprinted with advertising material. Some more sophisticated display stands are foldable to provide portability. These latter stands exhibit a number of problems. These stands comprise a rear wall and two foldable side walls with foldable shelves secured to the rear wall. These tend to be relatively flimsy structures and therefore tend to deteriorate rapidly when folded and unfolded repeatedly for transport to different display sites.
In supermarkets for display of food products the paper board legs stand directly on the supermarket floor and are subject to high moisture exposure, for example, due to liquid spills and even mopping of floors in the adjacent region. The water due to such mopping seeps into the paper board structure, causing delamination of the corrugated layers and warping of the legs. This can cause toppling of the structure and its contents. In addition, high humidity levels in the ambient atmosphere can cause delamination of the corrugated layers destroying the usefulness of the stand. Another problem, the cause of which is not generally understood, is bowing inward of the side walls at the supporting floor region. This bowing action reduces the footprint of the structure causing it to be easily toppled, again spilling its contents. Another problem is general weakness of the rear and side walls which tend to bend while in use due to the weight of objects being displayed and possibly the weight of the structure itself. For this reason these structures typically have their corrugations run vertically in an attempt to provide as much strength to the structure as possible, the corrugations being believed to act like reinforcement ribs to support a vertical load. However, even with the corrugations running vertically such structures are known to bend in response to vertical loads.
Still another problem is that the shelves, typically paper board, while secured to the rear wall need to be supported at their front region. To provide for this supporting action, dowels, typically wooden, are releaseably attached to the side walls at the front region of the side walls just beneath a shelf to be supported. The dowels can easily be lost or misplaced and are cumbersome to deal with in that they represent additional parts that need to be assembled and disassembled and transported with the primary structure forming the display stand. Yet another problem is that the paper board construction becomes soiled relatively quickly, becomes unsightly and needs to be discarded.